So what is Noir? I know that New Orleans isn't particularly "west", but with the companion there will be three new areas that are all in the west (plus Chicago). Any ideas for a catchy name for it? Or any Pinnacle staffers want to let us know what the "Veteran of the _____ West" is called?_________________Wild Card Creator: Any PDF, Any Setting, No Extra Cost.

So what is Noir? I know that New Orleans isn't particularly "west", but with the companion there will be three new areas that are all in the west (plus Chicago). Any ideas for a catchy name for it? Or any Pinnacle staffers want to let us know what the "Veteran of the _____ West" is called?

It's not the West at all. That was kind of the point of the Kickstarter, to determine interest in a non-Western Deadlands setting._________________Clint Black
Savage Worlds Core Rules Brand Manager

So what is Noir? I know that New Orleans isn't particularly "west", but with the companion there will be three new areas that are all in the west (plus Chicago). Any ideas for a catchy name for it? Or any Pinnacle staffers want to let us know what the "Veteran of the _____ West" is called?

I'm reading Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories (Eds. Bill Pronzini & Jack Adrian), because the "hard-boiled" literary genre is the precursor to film noir. I found a telling passage in the introduction:

Quote:

Although the hard-boiled story as we know it today was born in the 1920s, hard-boiled writing did not spring fully fledged from that anti-social maelstrom of the years between the two world wars. It was a melange of different styles and different genres, and its heroic figures can be traced back a hundred years earlier, to both the myth and the reality of the western frontier. The history of the United States abounds with larger-than-life loners whose accomplishments, whose very survival, depended on an uncompromising toughness and a willingness to enter into struggles against seemingly insurmountable odds: Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett, Jim Bridger, Mike Fink, Jim Bowie. Such rugged individualists inspired the creation of mythical heroes—Paul Bunyan, for instance—and of fictional men of action. Both James Fenimore Cooper's Nattty Bumppo and Herman Melville's Ahab are hunters driven by forces outside themselves, and in that sense are perfect paradigms of the modern private eye. Even Mark Twain's Huck Finn, and certainly Jack London's Wolf Larsen, have elements of the hard-boiled knight in their makeup.

Similarly, American hisory is filled with scoundrels and outlaws; persons motivated by greed, lust, and power; persons who hold human values and human life in little regard: William Bonney, John Wesley Hardin, Belle Starr, Herman W. Mudgett, and all the little-known and long-forgotten grifters, gamblers, confidence swindlers, whores, thieves, and paid assassins who inhabited the towns and cities, followed the railroads westward, and flocked to the gold-mining camps. These figures likewise inspired nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors, among them Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Frank R. Stockton, Upton Sinclair, and O. Henry. They, too, are the antecedents of the individuals who live in the pages of the modern noir story.

The intro then goes on to talk about dime novels, and how they held not only stories of the frontier but also New York City's mean streets, and how those stories became "hard-boiled fiction" in the pulps that came later (and put the dime novels out of style and out of business).

Anyway, it struck me as neat to think of the Noir genre as the direct descendant of Western tales. What links the Noir story most solidly with the Western tale is that both of them are quintessentially American art forms/genres._________________Matthew Cutter
Deadlands Big Bug (Brand Manager)
Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Inc.

Consider Bruce Willis' " Last Man Standing", a bit Noir-ish (is that a word?) and the same story as " A Fist Full of Dollars". The genre's are quite compatible.

William

And both are copies of Kurosawa's film Yojimbo.

Is it any wonder that Japan loves the American Western, or hard-boiled Noir stories? They have their own, nearly identical tradition.

And Yojimbo was in turn inspired from Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and The Glass Key...

One day, some scholar will track down the source story, and then we can all say "See! These 8 million stories are all the same."

Basic plot: hero wants something, villain stands in the way of hero, hero overcomes villain, hero wins. Works for tragedy too: protagonist is villain._________________"I had a whole bunch of advice for you but got ninja'd by newForumNewName. I'd just do what he says." -- 77IM

"While nFNN could be less of a jerk about how he says what he says, what he says is essentially correct." -- ValhallaGH

From the Yakov Smirnoff school of criticism, "In Soviet Russia, protaganist is villain!".

Russian literature is the best example of this, actually. Anna Kerenina, off the top of my head._________________"I had a whole bunch of advice for you but got ninja'd by newForumNewName. I'd just do what he says." -- 77IM

"While nFNN could be less of a jerk about how he says what he says, what he says is essentially correct." -- ValhallaGH